to those who have read the book itself, and to those who have not yet found time to read it.

I cannot plead much greater affection for the lucubrations of Amiel than for Count Tolstoi’s dealings with that odd compound of crudity and rottenness, the Russian nature; but Mr Arnold’s “Amiel” is admirable.  Never was there a more “gentlemanly correction,” a more delicate and good-humoured setting to rights, than that which he administers to Amiel’s two great panegyrists (who happened to be Mr Arnold’s own niece and Mr Arnold’s own friend).  On subjects like Maya and the “great wheel” it would almost be impossible to conceive, and certainly impossible to find, a happier commentator than Mr Arnold, though perhaps in the regions of theology he had a private Maya, a very Great Wheel, of his own.  The firmness with which he rebukes the maunderings of the Genevese hypochondriac—­of whom some one once unkindly remarked that he was not so much intoxicated with Idealism as suffering from the subsequent headache—­is equalled by the kindness of the dealing; and the quiet decision with which he puts his fine writing in its proper place is better still.  Nobody could call Mr Arnold a Philistine or one insensible to finesse, grace, sehnsucht, the impalpable and intangible charm of melancholy and of thought.  And his comments on Amiel’s loaded pathos and his muddled meditation are therefore invaluable.  Nor is he less happy or less just in the praise which, though not the first, he was one of the first to give to by far the strongest side of Amiel’s talent, his really remarkable power of literary criticism.

But the best wine was still kept for the very last.  It will have been observed in these brief sketches of his work that, since his return to the fields of literature proper, Mr Arnold had drawn nearer to the causerie and farther from the abstract critical essay,—­that he had taken to that mixture of biography, abstract of work, and interspersed critical comment which Sainte-Beuve, though he did not exactly invent it, had perfected, and which somebody, I think, has recently described as “intensely irritating.”  Well! well! pearls, as we all know, are irritating to certain classes of consumers.  He had from the first done this well, he now did it consummately.  That he took occasion, in the paper on Shelley’s life which appeared in the Nineteenth Century for January 1888, to repeat his pet heresy about Shelley’s poetry, matters nothing at all.  It is an innocent defiance, and no attempt whatever is made to support it by argument.  The purpose of the essay is quite different.  Already, some years before, in his article on Keats, Mr Arnold had dealt some pretty sharp blows both at the indiscretion of a certain class of modern literary biographers, and at the pawing and morbid sentimentality of the same persons or others.  He had a new and a better opportunity in the matter he was now handling, and he struck more strongly,